UPDATED– Scroll to the bottom for an update.

Friday was a bad day. I’d been developing and deploying to my Blackberry Playbook with no trouble at all (with latest firmware 1.0.3.1868). So much so, in fact, that it’s charge was getting pretty low, even though it’d been plugged into a laptop (MacBook Pro) all day – I hadn’t properly charged it for a few days. It was close to 0% – something I’ll try to avoid in future.

Anyway, I got home and plugged the Playbook in using the charger that came with the unit. What happened next was not good. The red LED came on as usual, it went off a few seconds later and was closely followed by the BlackBerry Playbook splash screen.

Unfortunately, this only appeared for a split second and then vanished – usually, this is the start of visual bit of the boot sequence.

Then came the red LED again……. Oh dear!!!! ….. This cycle when on continuously, getting no further than a seconds worth of the splash screen.

What now?

I left the thing going through this booting cycle for an hour or so but then started to get impatient. During which time, I started Googling to find anyone else’s experiences with this. To my dismay, there are several forum threads out there describing similar things.

I tried numerous times at attempting the hard reset option (of which there are several methods referenced). These include :-

Pressing the Power button + Vol Up + Vol Down

Pressing the Power button + Vol Up

Pressing the Power button

All of which has to be done from anything from 10 seconds to 30 seconds.

Unfortunately, that did nothing – other than making my fingers a little sore.

I tried changing which wall outlet I was using – just in case there was a difference between using a multi-plug block as opposed to directly into a wall socket. No difference.

The only thing that did seem odd was that when I disconnected the power during the rebooting cycle, the red LED would go off as usual but then there would be a sequence of five green/yellow LED flashes – as described in one of the links above – indicating a dead battery. I pretty much knew the battery was flat so that kind of made sense.

The question was, was the charger unable to provide the tablet with enough power to get it passed a specific point the boot sequence to start charging properly? Was the charger not giving enough power? Was the battery really and terminally dead?

I sent a support mail to BlackBerry as I was under a 90 day complimentary support. Fortunately, I got a relatively quick response back indicating I should put the device on charge for several hours to build it up. At the time I had to pop out and about, so I put it on charge. The only question that I had was – was it really charging. Unfortunately, they were also going to be out-of-office until Monday.

If I left it continuously rebooting, was that charging? I doubted that one. If I tried the hard reset option, it would stop the rebooting cycle but not show any signs that it was charging. I opted for the latter.

The next day – Saturday …..

I was busy pretty much all day but did get a moment or two first thing to see if it had charged. But no, it hadn’t. I left it rebooting this time, for a while again – although something felt it would be doing more harm than good leaving it in that state. Yet again nothing.

I even decided to follow some information from one of the links suggesting to use the Desktop Manager software on a PC, as at the time it doesn’t do anything on a Mac. So I dusted off my old PC and fired it up. Once it was installed and up and running, a pop-up appeared indicating that the Playbook’s battery was dead or was doing something else (like an update). The two options were to Retry or Update. As I didn’t really have anything on the Playbook other than a good handful of apps including Sum It All Up (shameless plug) and some part developed new ones, I wasn’t going to loose much. So Update it was. After ages of downloading a package ending in the word ‘debrick’ ??? and installing it, the process had seemingly gone through successfully and completed, but unfortunately, had done nothing to improve the rebooting.

I knew from the e-mail from that BlackBerry support wouldn’t reply til Monday but I replied with my findings so far – hoping there was a magic fix. It was a bit disconcerting to receive a mail back entitled ‘Please submit BlackBerry inquiry via approved channel‘. Maybe it was because it was the weekend, maybe not – I didn’t have time to find an alternative channel.

Sunday….

I was getting impatient now and still frustrated that the thing wasn’t working.

It’d had been left overnight again, so the tablet fairies could work there magic and sort it out for me. I powered it up. Got the red LED, a slight pause, the BlackBerry Playbook splash screen and the off for another reboot. DAMN!!!!

A little over frustration kicked in, along with a grasp at an idea. As I understand it, the Playbook doesn’t charge if it’s switched off but charges quite happily if in standby. Yet if the battery is dead, how can it be in standby to charge? It’s a bit of chicken catching 22 eggs.

My rational for what I tried was that if it’s off, it won’t charge. If it’s booting, it’s using all it’s power to try and charge and boot the device. What if I tried to put it in standby whilst it’s booting so it’d only have to do one thing.

So I plugged it in. Got the red LED and I started repeatedly pressing the power button. The red light went off for a second or two and the splash page appeared ……. and stayed ……. and stayed……

IT WORKED!!!!! I don’t really know why, but my PlayBook was starting up.

My PlayBook had been completely factory reset – which I presume was due to the update, various hard resets or my general mental frustration. Either way it’s back and I can go and play my really great game Sum It All Up and I think you should all check it out for yourselves.

It would be interesting to know what the real problem is and it would be even better if it were fixed in the next firmware update. If the battery gets low again and the same situation arises, I’ll try this method out again and try to record the process.

If anyone else suffers the continual rebooting and is at loss of what to do, perhaps give it a try and let me know if it works for you. I certainly can’t guarantee it. I’m going to reply to BlackBerry with my updated findings to see what they have to say for themselves – it may even turn out that my device is defective in some way, I hope not as I don’t really want to go through the whole process of returning the device and waiting on a replacement. We shall see.

UPDATE

Although I’ve not tried it, I’m a little to nervous to drain my battery, but as of Blackberry Playbook Firmware 1.0.5.2342 the device can now charge when powered off, so the likelihood of getting into a continual reboot scenario is significantly diminished. Other changes may also help in this matter.

Just to announce the release of my latest game for the Blackberry Playbook™.

Thanks to Research In Motion’s promotion, offering a free Blackberry Playbook™ to Adobe AIR developers who successfully have an App submitted and accepted in the Blackberry App World, I’ve now got a free Playbook – woohoo.

My App is a maths game where you are given an answer to a sum, a set of numbers and using any of add, subtract, multiply or divide, find that answer within the given time limit.

For a full set of features and screen shots, click on one of the following images.

Moving along from my Solid Textures experiment, I’ve put together a new plugin for Prefab3D to allow you to generate procedural/solid textures for your models. By chaining together specific modules, all kinds of textures can be created from wood, marble, cellular, brickwork to just noise.

Here is another ‘Explorer’ tool for you to have a tinker with. This again is something I’ve been working on for a while and have now finally found the time to get something out there.

The ‘Solid Textures Explorer’ allows you to generate and modify in real-time procedural or solid textures in Flash using Away3D. The procedural textures utilise a 3D perlin noise function implemented as a PixelBender shader along with a secondary shader to provide modification of the noise function into a more useful texture.

The explorer is a work-in-progress for further up and coming procedural textures, so watch this space.